Style but no substance on chilly Decemberists' night

November 13, 2006|By Joshua Klein, Special to the Tribune

Colin Meloy is a gifted songwriter, but he and his band the Decemberists have always had a distracting air of artifice about them. It typically manifests itself as self-satisfied whimsy, like kids putting on a play, or at least playing dress-up. Often Meloy's winning, winsome melodies make up for this trait; at worst, the band -- lacking the forgiving charms of children -- comes off a little smug.

Some of those arch tendencies were put in check at a sold-out Riviera Saturday night.

"The Crane Wife," the Decemberists' latest release and the source of most of Saturday's set, tempers those bad habits with Meloy's strongest collection of songs to date.

But with the band's fortunes rising so quickly, it must be tough for the group. Adulation breeds arrogance, and arrogance begets indulgence.

Maybe that explains why the band kept shooting itself in the foot with semi-ironic invocations of rock-concert cliches, such as the dreaded extended singalong.

The show even closed with an inept band-orchestrated audience-participation re-creation of the final battle scenes from "The Hobbit," cute but apparently arranged for the group's own amusement, because it ended the evening on a pointlessly silly note.

Fortunately, the band was in excellent form. Epics from the new album such as "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" and "The Island" were, in the case of the former, genuinely stirring, and in the case of the latter, downright impressive in its approximation of '70s prog rock.

The Civil War narrative "Yankee Bayonet" may even be the best application yet of Meloy's anachronistic lyrics, its stylized but touching tale of separated lovers coming across as more than just a compendium of affectations.

"O did you see all the dead of Manassas," Meloy sang, "All the bellies and the bones and the bile?" "No, I lingered here with the blankets barren, and my own belly big with child," responded multi-instrumentalist Lisa Molinaro.

There's still an element of dress-up to what the Decemberists do, something that never hampered the British folk-rock pioneers Meloy likes to reference. But the slightly more earnest direction of the group's music hints there's more in store than just brainiac college rock, maybe even something, dare it be said, more mature.

Until then, the Decemberists remain surface music, failing to stir the soul even if they have an easy time getting you to clap your hands and tap your feet.